A run ‘n gun filmmaker’s POV on the business and creative world of new media and web tv

Week 5 In Review – The Hayley Project

We’re over 15,000 views in aggregate now and we’ve had a faster rate of subscriber adoption and viewership over this last week

Nearing 250 subscribers (thanks to the advocates who are promoting THP!)

Episode 11 and Episode 12 had much higher view rates than previous episodes. Hopefully, this trend will continue

Note: This is why Tubemogul rocks.

Other learnings/developments

During the last week, our show had an increase in awareness within a new “network/cluster” (i.e., a social cluster closely linked by the member’s common interests). Initially, we had seen some LG15 fans watching our show. Over this last week, however, our show found a new demographic and social cluster, and the rapid spread of THP awareness within this social cluster resulted in an uptick in views. I’ll write more about this in a separate post, because I find the network effects fascinating. Basically, a few influencers in this new cluster/network found THP and started advocating our show among their network, which caused a rapid increase in our subscriber base and views

The provocative title “bad girls” for Episode 11 is likely a contributing factor to the quick rise in views (2nd highest total views among all episodes in less than 1 week). If you look at some of the other more successful episodes of other series out there, you’ll notice that either 1) the thumbnail is provocative or 2) the title is. Let’s face it. Sex sells, especially when the largest segment of video viewers are young males

Rachel, the producers, and I have all been very excited about viewer reaction. More people are posting comments on the channel page and individual episodes. It’s really fun seeing the fans interact with Hayley, and I know Rachel is really appreciative of the support her character is gaining

We don’t believe the facebook ads are really adding much value, so we’ve turned them off. It’s hard to measure what the impact is since we reached a new social cluster that accounted for our rise in viewership

I’m planning on stopping distribution through other platforms and use youtube exclusively. We have very few views on the other platforms, and I don’t see any benefit of running the series to completion at this time

Since we’re part of the youtube partner program, we’re allowed to have banners on our channel page. Check it out. I think it came out nice. Special thanks to Laura from NYU who’s helping us out with our website and our banners

Issues

Episode 1 and Episode 2 have been removed from youtube! Why? I’m not 100% sure. But believe it or not, there was some confusion among some viewers as to whether or not the show was real. This is likely due to the first-person nature of the vlogging and episode descriptions. Still, I’m not sure how anybody could think this series was real. The best response to someone asking whether the show was real or not was posted by another youtuber: “yeah, sure. its real. and so are the flashbacks. and the dramatic music too.” Anyway, I’m not sure why these two episodes are removed but I’ll investigate and report back

We’re certainly considering it. But because we don’t have a real marketing budget, the impact is likely to be insignificant unless we 1) put more money into CPC or 2) pay by CPM if its more efficient in terms of cost